The Fish and the Reptile

One of my favorite short stories is in a book called Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino-- a collection of pieces in which some ancient creature tells stories about the universe, from the Big Bang up through life on Earth. The one that always gets me is called "The Aquatic Uncle", and in this one the narrator's a young amphibian. His family's so new to the land, in fact, that they're still ashamed of their unevolved great-uncle, a crusty old-fashioned fish with no interest in leaving the water. This amphibian-narrator is in love, too, with a new kind of creature-- a scampering dry-land reptile. She's modern, sophisticated, full of evolutionary wealth. But eventually she meets that embarrassing old fish-uncle, and of course she finds him... special. Noble. More alluring than any in-between amphibian could ever hope to be.

It's a story about that in-betweenness, really, but the beauty of it is how broadly, fundamentally human its dynamics are. You can think of it as a parallel for a lot of things: social class, wealth, education, politics, taste. Maybe even taste in music, if you want. When it comes to taste, we're all amphibious: We can keep our feet in different places, enjoying different things. Get people talking together, though-- put us in some sort of context-- and you start noticing desires, sometimes collective ones. It's never as simple as a particular sound or trend. But it can be a mood or sensibility you're drawn to in lots of things-- like the kind of glowy, stoned escapism you mightget from chillwave, disco edits, breezy Scandinavian pop, woozy L.A. hip-hop, or any number of other places. Or a sudden craving for metal and noise or something that feels sick. Or the search for something "smarter," or more aggressive, or more adult, or more political. Gravitating to the reptile instead of the boring old fish happens when one kid decides to dress more like this and less like that, and another kid's attracted to hanging out with these people instead of those.

I mention this because I felt like popular indie rock put up a couple of big arrows last month, reptile-wise. Scan through reviews of the new Titus Andronicus album, The Monitor, and you'll find a certain kind of praise: It'll be called incendiary, thunderous, heart-on-sleeve. Boisterous, boozy, and righteous. Something with "the heart of a raging bull." It'll be called passionate, breathless, down-and-dirty, "filled with ragged glory." At least two different publications will refer to it as a "beast"-- a full-throated, blood-pumping stand-out from a lot of the indie records being reviewed around it.

Those compliments are well-earned; it really is a rousing record. Of course, it's also a record that, at various points over the past 30 years, might have been considered more par for the course, passion-wise: A great album of not-that-unusual vigor, bull-hearted but not exceptionally so. This is one obvious difference between living "at various points over the past 30 years" and living now, in the context of an indie rock scene where this band's energy feels notable and vital. You get the sense not only that Titus Andronicus made a good album, but also that they made a type of album people wanted: one with qualities some listeners were missing, searching for, or ready to be excited about. Something people needed. A scampering reptile of a record.

Meanwhile, across two rivers, the Queens group Freelance Whales released an album called Weathervanes, to mixed reviews-- some cheers, some skepticism. Enthusiastic or not, critics' responses tended to aim a good number of words at the album's context. Esquire, for instance, praised the record, but the whole item was laced with fretting and cultural references: worry that the band "could soon land in the twee pile of what-Zach-Braff-hath-wrought," references to Jason Schwartzman and "The O.C.", talk about its "derivations of faux-naïve Postal Service stuff," even a second Braff reference to close. Ian Cohen's review here at Pitchfork deployed some similar pointers: Etsy, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, "Manic Pixie Dream Girls," Zooey Deschanel. Most everyone mentioned the extent to which this band's singer has adopted the phrasing, cadences, and melodic sense of Deschanel's husband Ben Gibbard, which is only partly a criticism of being imitative: More importantly, it's a criticism of imitating the wrong thing. A thing that makes certain people wince or roll their eyes and turn away.

So you get the sense not only that critics have mixed feelings about the quality of Weathervanes, but also that Freelance Whales have made a type of record some people don't necessarily want-- an album with qualities some listeners are wary of, turning against, or at least not easily impressed by anymore, if they ever were. A funny old fish of a record. (Not that you need a weathervane to tell which way that particular wind blows.)

And this is always the way it goes: Take any niche audience at any given moment and there'll be those qualities we're excited to embrace, and those we're skeptical or intolerant of. These aren't just arbitrary cycles of fashion, though that's certainly part of it. Sometimes they're more like the motor that makes (and keeps) music exciting-- this feeling that, at any given point, we're finding the sensibility we need, the ways of being that are right for how we're living. Shortly after re-reading that Calvino story, I came across this idea from literary theory called "mimetic desire," which suggests that often, instead of just wanting things, we mostly want to turn into the people who have those things-- hence every commercial that skips talking about the product and just shows happy, confident people enjoying it. This isn't far from that feeling that can make liking one musician more than another seem like a meaningful part of who you are and how you relate to the world, instead of just some abstract preference about chords and melodies. Even if it's just taste, the reptile and the fish can feel like the things you're trying to become, and the things you're afraid of becoming. Most of the time, your personal fish turns out to be someone else's reptile, or vice versa-- but that's the whole idea, right?

It also means that just designating something the fish doesn't make it go away: The fish is always right there, underwater, wondering why the hell you think you're so special all of a sudden. I know at least two people-- one younger, one older-- who grumbled a bit at this site's review of Freelance Whales. In both cases the grumbling wasn't just about liking the album better than Cohen did. The question, for both, was about context again. The question was: what's wrong with this kind of thing? Have we reached some point where our knees jerk and we kick away anything any critic can write off as cutesy or "twee" or associate with the wrong movies? Is that necessarily fair? And what if I like the record: Am I just supposed to fuck off, then? What's supposed to happen to whatever you're calling the fish these days?

Some of those grumbles are ones I'm sensitive to, because I grew up being nagged at by something similar: I could never figure out why our conversations always seemed to value things that were brash or aggressive more than things that wanted to be elegant or pretty. Still, it's hard to call this unfair. We don't usually write off the fish entirely; we just have less time and use for it, so we return to it less often, and only when it's done really, really well. Sometimes the fish winds up burying itself in the lakebed and hibernating, waiting for someone, decades down the line, to rediscover it and find it useful again-- just like Calvino's reptile saw a magic in that old fish that the amphibian never could. More often, it just winds itself into something else, melding its DNA into some other conversation. And sometimes it regroups. I've written before about finding a style of music that turned these dynamics on their head: indiepop of the twee-and-snotty-about-it variety. Instead of just being dispossessed, this music seemed to realize something: If people value transgressive shouts over sweetness and innocence, doesn't that mean your sweetness and innocence can be... transgressive? Tricks like this can breathe all kinds of life and purpose into some old fish of a sensibility-- turning it into a kind of radical gesture, or claiming a new conversation all to itself.

I'm asking you, though. I'm almost certainly wrong, for your personal purposes, about what's the fish and what's the scampering reptile in modern indie-- there's never any single answer to that question. Where you're standing, and among the people you talk to, they're surely different things entirely: For some of you reading this, I'm sure Ke$ha is the fish and Freelance Whales are the reptile. Or maybe your desires run from Nicki Minaj to Alley Boy, or from Terry Riley to black metal, or a billion other directions.

Personally, I've spent the past couple weeks, thanks to a tip from another writer, listening to an upcoming record by an English band called Male Bonding. They're probably the hippest band you're going to find classifying themselves as "grunge" on their MySpace page, though the direction they're coming from is more raised-on-Nirvana than earnest bleating-- zoomy, melodic rock with some splashes of Abe Vigoda in there. They've made a terrific album, but what amazes me about it is this sweet spot it's hitting: From the very first bar, it's full of the loose, rangy energy and fuzzy grace of a lot of 1990s indie rock-- a kind of hazy hustle that's been left back underwater so long that it feels fresh and striking again. The scene they come out of is full of rudimentary post-punk and lo-fi obscurity (Male Bonding's first releases were noise-cloaked to the point of uselessness), but on songs like "Year's Not Long", they seem to be pointing out toward something. I get the same feeling from singles by Screaming Females ("Pretty OK", "I Do"), from No Age songs like "Teen Creeps", maybe even from Girls' shoegaze turn on "Morning Light". All feel like they're breaking out of the noise-pop holding pattern, into a place of shaggy energy and personality. Maybe it's just the amount of plaid and the slight taper on jeans in clothing stores this year, but it feels like there's a spark around this sort of thing-- a blurry reptile somewhere off on the horizon.

But that's me: What's yours? What do you think you're ready to be surprised by?